Mallorca - The Making of the Landscape (Hardcover, New)

Mallorca - the island of Robert Graves, Joan Miro, and Archduke Ludwig Salvador - has become the most popular holiday destination in the Mediterranean, with nearly 10 million visitors a year. Few, however, are aware of the 5,000 year history of Mallorca and its resulting landscape featuring late Bronze Age navetes and talayots, Roman cities, and a major medieval trading port with one of Europe's largest cathedrals. Mallorca's landscape has been formed with a pattern of country houses and enclosed fields, and the relics of major 19th-century industries, including textiles and shoe-making workshops. 120 years of tourism, latterly on a massive scale, endangers much of what has gone before. This pioneering work, based on more than 10 years of local research, describes and analyzes all these elements that together form the contemporary landscape. Written in an accessible style and well-illustrated with maps and photographs, this book will appeal to student and concerned reader alike and should be read by all who are inquisitive about what they see around them when they visit the island. *** ..".a must for anyone curious about this lesser sung story of history, making 'Mallorca' a fine and quite recommended read, not to be missed." - The Midwest Book Review, Library Bookwatch, April 2013, The World History Shelf *** "Buswell's latest book has no peer in English....he draws on various epistemological perspectives to portray the landscape as a cultural artifact that is unique due to changing human settlement and exploitation, but also is a palimpsest bearing telltale signs of sequent occupancy never completely erased." - The AAG Review of Books, Fall 2013